Tag: Aribeth

#8: Aribeth de Tylmarande (Neverwinter Nights)

catslevania-symphonyofthenyan:

River's Top Ten Favorite Villains [8/10]

Paladin of Tyr fallen from grace, the elven blackguard Aribeth de Tylmarande is my first BioWare villain love. She entered my life when I was eleven, ranking her only slightly lower than Legolas and considerably higher than Drizzt on my list of “Elves I Enjoy, as Ranked by Seniority”.

(Backstory not free of spoilers, but then again this game came out over ten years ago, so if you haven’t played it yet you’re probably not going to) In the main campaign of Neverwinter Nights, Aribeth begins as a distinguished paladin of Tyr. She aids the player by providing healing and mercantile services, as well as advice about how to proceed in the story. However, at the end of Act 1, an enraged city of Neverwinter turns on her lover Fenthick for his (unwitting) association with the Act 1 big bad. The people call for Fenthick’s death and hang him. This drives Aribeth into a downward spiral of malice and misery. She abandons the player and friends, and returns later in the game with an army at her back, looking to do more than merely avenge her lost love. What becomes of Aribeth after this time is up to the player (it IS a BioWare game, after all), but by the time the expansion pack Hordes of the Underdark comes along, her soul has been banished to the Hell plane of Cania.

So what do I like about her? For one, I’m amused by the reversal of the “kill the girlfriend to further the man pain” cliche. It’s still a cliche regardless of the genders involved, but if you have to sit through the cliche, might as well make it the slightly more interesting version. And actually, I really liked Fenthick, and I liked Fenthick and Aribeth together, and I was eleven the first time I played it so I wasn’t conscious of the cliche aspect and I could just stew in my feels.

Furthermore, again, maybe it has something to do with being eleven at the time, but Aribeth was my first fallen-hero-turned-villain, or at least the first one that gave me real investment in her emotional journey. There’s a huge difference between starting up a game and having a narrator say “there was a hero, the hero turned into a dick, and now you have to go punch her”, and actually watching the hero turn into a dick and realizing that you will need to be the one to punch her. I tend to think of Aribeth as BioWare’s best executed character of this type until Anders came along in Dragon Age 2.

If Nadia were to meet Aribeth herself, somehow returned either as a shade or in the flesh, what would she say? Would she want to understand Aribeth’s point of view on what happened to her?

((Yes, she would absolutely want to understand. Not only is trying to understand/anticipate the motivations of others a long-standing habit of Nadia’s (it helps her figure out how to resolve conflicts and perhaps more importantly step back from the situation and keep her temper in check), it would be doubly important to her in Aribeth’s case:

Aribeth was Nadia’s idol for a long time, and now stands as an example of exactly what Nadia doesn’t want to turn into. Understanding how and why Aribeth Fell would (at least in theory) make it that much easier for Nadia to avoid those circumstances and, hopefully, avoid Falling herself.

……Of course, all of this would come after the shock and confusion and You-can’t-be’s and Who-are-you-really’s and How-are-you-here’s that are kind of mandatory when dealing with someone who, by all accounts, is supposed to be dead and gone.))